Maya Ober, PhD, is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern. Her research focuses on feminist practices in universities, with a particular emphasis on design education and design schools. Working at the intersection of feminist theory, institutional studies, and critical design research, she examines universities as affective socio-political spaces in which institutional and epistemic norms—especially claims to neutrality and apoliticality—are produced, negotiated, and contested.
Her work investigates how feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial interventions reshape curricula, pedagogical practices, spatial arrangements, and institutional processes within design education. By foregrounding students’ and educators’ everyday practices, her research highlights how universities function simultaneously as sites of knowledge production, institutional power, and political struggle, and how design education plays a key role in materializing these dynamics beyond the university.
Her SNSF Doc.CH–funded doctoral research resulted in the monograph Building Our Own Fire: Traces and Hows of Feminist Practices at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism (FADU) in Buenos Aires (PhD dissertation, University of Bern, summa cum laude). Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the study examines feminist practices within one of South America’s largest design schools against the backdrop of mass feminist mobilizations in Argentina. It analyzes the affective, social, and material dimensions of university life, documenting how feminist students and educators intervened in curricula, spatial arrangements, and institutional processes. Conceptually, the dissertation contributes to feminist theory, critical university studies, critical design studies, and feminist anthropology by articulating a grammar of feminist worldbuilding, showing how material, affective, and sonic traces of feminist interventions interact with modes of practice to create institutional openings, sustain change over time, and reimagine university space.
Drawing on affect theory and autoethnography, Ober has also examined the micro-politics of hegemonic design pedagogy and its impact on students’ everyday subjectivities, most notably in the article “Design Is Not for the Weak: On Use and Exhaustion in Design Education” (2022).
[https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/arcosdesign/article/view/64291]
She is the author of the peer-reviewed book chapter (In)visibilidades de la raza en la cotidianidad universitaria. Blanquitud, espacio y resistencia, which explores the reproduction of whiteness in design education and institutional life. The chapter appears in Mientras miro las nuevas olas: Qué cambió, qué no y qué se resiste con la irrupción feminista en las universidades argentinas, edited by Rafael Blanco (CLACSO) (2026 in press).
Ober has also conducted archival research at the Ulm School of Design (1953–1968), focusing on rejected student applications to examine how notions of quality and aptitude were institutionalized in postwar design education. Using archival ethnography and feminist methodologies, her article Exploring the Unseen: Archival Ethnography of Rejected Applications at the Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm) in the “Journal of Design History” (Oxford University Press) shows how admission practices reproduced social hierarchies despite the school’s official democratic ideals, offering a critical genealogy of institutional norms in design education.
In addition to her ethnographic and historical research, Ober is actively engaged in collaborative and editorial scholarship. As guest editor of the special issue “Multivocality: Feminist Practices of Design” in “RChD: Creación y Pensamiento” (University of Chile), she coordinated contributions from across Latin America examining feminist interventions in design education, institutional life, and professional practice. This editorial work strengthened her ability to synthesize diverse epistemic positions and critically analyze how normative structures, such as neutrality, are produced and contested across institutional and geopolitical contexts. Her co-authored peer-reviewed book chapter NOT A TOOLKIT. A Conversation on the Discomfort of Feminist Design Pedagogy and Educating Otherwise: Transformative Potenziale der Designausbildung reflect sustained engagement with pedagogy, institutional dynamics, and the politics of design.
Ober has a multidisciplinary background in social anthropology, gender studies, and design research. She studied Design Research at the Bern University of the Arts and Industrial Design at the Holon Institute of Technology before earning her PhD in Social Anthropology, with a supplementary specialization in Gender Studies, from the University of Bern (2025).
In 2024, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. As an educator, she has taught design theory and practice across Argentina, Chile, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, and Portugal. Between 2022 and 2024, she co-led the Intersectional Lab in Arts and Design at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, where she was responsible for curricular development. In recognition of her contributions to design education and research, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts London (2025).
Alongside her academic work, Ober co-runs Futuress, a feminist publishing and learning platform at the intersection of design, education, and social justice, together with Mio Kojima. For this work, she was awarded the Swiss Design Award by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.
